ABSTRACT: This
paper argues that liberalism provides democracy with the experience of civic reformism.
Without it, democracy loses any tie-argumentative or practical-to a coherent design of
public policy endeavoring to provide the resources for the realization of democratic
citizenship. The case for liberalism rests on an argumentative reconstruction of the
function it performs before the rise of a world economic order and, more specifically, in
the creation of the welfare state after the Second World War. Accordingly, liberalism
defines a reformist political program: it is an emancipatory political project by virtue
of its struggle for an egalitarian and universalist extension of citizenship rights. This
is but a formulation of the modern idea of citizenship, conceived of as a universalizable
contract of rights. At the same time, liberalism embraces a socioeconomic emancipatory
project that endeavors to provide the conditions, within the institutional framework of
modern societies, for the accomplishment of citizenship rights.

The origins of liberalism in the seventeenth century tell the story of
the struggle for recognition of religious tolerance. This early form of pluralism provided
the antecedent for the constitutional recognition of civil rights, interpreted in terms of
universal adscription. A further step of constitution-building in liberal polities was
taken when the universal principles of equality and liberty assumed the status of
fundamental rights. That happened under the form of a constitutional program aimed at the
improvement of the civil condition. Liberalism as a revolution of rights not only meant
the conquest of civil rights by society, but also their extension by constitutional means.
Both dimensions, the emancipatory and the egalitarian-universalist, gave form to the
original liberalism.

For its later history, liberalism owes as much to its antecedents
(situated at the rise of parliamentary assemblies and of the rule of law in the Middle
Ages), as to its linkages with the republican tradition of communal self-government (from
the seventeenth century onwards), and with the socialist tradition in support for an
egalitarian model of society (as from the eighteenth century). Indeed, it is this double
tie what determines that the political history of liberalism belongs to the history of
modern democracy: a representative democracy but, thereby, pluralist. The tie also
explains that the economic history of liberalism cannot be separated from the birth of the
welfare state.

In both respects liberalism defines a reformist political program: it
is an emancipatory political project by virtue of its struggle for an egalitarian and
universalist extension of citizenship rights. This is but a formulation of the modern idea
of citizenship, conceived of as a universalizable contract of rights. At the same
time, liberalism embraces a socio-economic emancipatory project that endeavors to provide
the conditions, within the institutional frame of modern societies, for the accomplishment
of citizenship rights. Let us comment on this double characterization.

Liberal Citizenship: A Universalizable Contract of Rights

Firstly, if citizenship denotes the membership statute of individuals
and social groups belonging to a political community (namely, a state), the own idea of
membership embodies the establishment of a bilateral relation between the individual and
the community or the state. Citizenship empowers individuals to entering the
communitys political life. It is an egalitarian empowerment to the extent
that the statute acknowledges in every citizen an equal civic capacity to act in politics.
It is also universalist as long as the statute enables the citizen to participate
in a domain of rights of universal intent. This universalism of rights assumed by modern
citizenship has a normative sense, that is: as a theoretical and legal assumption,
it enables us to think rationally the idea of an egalitarian-universalist condition of
civic rights shared by every individual by virtue of his own humanity. This normative
provision focuses citizenship in terms of a tension between membership of a community and
exclusion from it.

The mode of access to citizenship determines the scope of the bilateral
relation that binds the citizen to the state. Thus, citizenship can be assumed by birth or
by contract, the options that generically are called ius sanguinis and ius soli,
though the experience of democratic polities rather suggests the application of mixed
solutions. The former founds membership on blood ties, while the latter refers it to a
contractual relation. The mode of access separates the legal status of citizens from that
of non-citizens, granting to each mode unequal expectations of inclusion: unattainable in
the case of natural belonging and reachable, under certain conditions, in the
other.

As regards its content or normative program, the right of citizenship
gives access to a cluster of rights. Civil in its origins, the history of modern
citizenship lights up the birth of modern civil society in the seventeenth century. Later
on, the rights to associate and participate open the way for the creation of rights social
and economic. Up to this stage runs T. H. Marshalls argument on citizenship,
circumscribed to the British case, where it describes the itinerary of citizenship from an
original conquest of civil rights to the constitutional incorporation of welfare rights,
mediated by the conquest of political citizenship (Marshall 1977, pp. 71 ff.). His
interpretation reproduces the transit from the liberal state to the social or, better, the
democratic welfare state (Díaz 1996), though it simplifies in a triadic, dialectical
model the complex genesis of modern citizenship.

Besides, the three stages interact with other dimensions of civic life,
giving rise to new forms of citizenship (Turner 1997). Thus, we can speak of cultural
citizenship when considering the meaning of culture for civility (Pakulski 1997);
ecological citizenship when civic conscience is informed by the ecological sensibility
(van Steenbergen 1994); or of a gender-unbiased citizenship when civic life is redefined
in non-sexist terms (Vogel 1991). Namely, when equality overcomes gender prejudice and
discrimination. Opportunities do not spring spontaneously. They grow out of an
institutionalized socializing process. Hence, the importance of education for civic
equality and egalitarian participation in public life: two aims that underline the
universalist thrust of modern citizenship.

Even more, given the continuity that exists between the transformations
of both the state and citizenship, it would be useful paying attention to recent
institutional changes that envisage a postnational domain of civic rights (Habermas
1996, pp. 125-153). At that level, the originary, state-framed relation of the civic
political identity to the community opens the way to a multivocal relation. A relation
that blends the sharing of diverse collective identities with a common support (voluntary
or contractual) for the constitutional tradition that grounds the political community. The
matter in question is not to assess citizenship in the context of the end of the
state, but of its transformations. Accordingly, we have to assess the changing
meanings of citizenship. After all, the state, not the nation, remains the basic reference
for citizenship, although the politics of citizenship is but the politics of nationality.

Reformism and the Dimensions of Liberalism

In the second place, liberalism constitutes a socio-economic reformist
project. A project endeavored to provide the basic resources for the exercise of
citizenship. The liberal who ceases to seek new opportunities, Dahrendorf has
written, ceases to be a liberal (1988, p. 18). Liberalism does not legitimate
itself by its reformist and egalitarian appeal. It depends, rather, on the political
reasonability of its project to be instituted. Nevertheless, liberalism is more than an
intellectual tradition (Hayek). It is a mode of understanding and practising politics in a
deliberative and participatory way. Liberalism assumes political representation to be a
necessary mediation for the institutional complexity of modern societies, though it does
not mean to abandon the assumption of participation as the full accomplishment of the
civil condition. Besides, for liberalism the role of government should be headed to ensure
that the access to basic rights and resources in made fairly. From that stage on,
liberalism advocates no equality of results, something that would contradict its defense
of liberty.

By the other side, liberal universalism is a civic universalism,
meaning that, as long as political theory and political program, its normative horizon is
defined by the project of a universalist extension of citizenship rights. The civil
condition refers both to the real or historical condition of citizenship, and to its
normative framework, that which allow us to think rationally the chances for citizenship.
We had said before that liberalism is a politics of democratic citizenship in a double
sense: concerning rights and concerning resources. Well, it is just the linkage of both
dimensions what gives a normative sense to liberal politics. The tension between liberal
political theory and a liberal policy can be illustrated by Amartya Sens distinction
between freedom and means of freedom, a distinction that takes the debate on
equality to the crossroads of rights and resources (Sen 1992).

Liberalism is a social theory likewise. As such, it endorses a
pluralist model of society. However, liberal pluralism is founded on an egalitarian model
of rights and opportunities. The states neutrality means non-interference with the
diversity of life choices. In modern politics (representative and universalist), pluralism
speaks for civil societys diversity. Namely, the forms of association that
articulate society autonomously but, at the same time, describing a complex interaction
with the state associations (Rosales and Rubio-Carracedo 1997).

The idea of distributive justice quite approximately depicts the nature
of pluralism: its principles are plural, knowledge and the interpretations are plural, the
goods, the resources and the criteria for justice are plural. Thus, cultures and polities
too. Civil diversity turns pluralism universal. What makes it differ from political
relativism, anyway? Its defense of equality being compatible with the vindication of
difference; its own idea of pluralism in terms of distributive justice; lastly, its
defense of a fair pluralism: egalitarian, inclusive and, therefore, universalist.

A liberal pluralist community, we can argue as from Walzer
(1983), not only is a community that includes diverse social groups and, therefore,
tolerates different collective identities living together. It is, above all, an open and
egalitarian community, built on a fair scheme of distribution of life chances
(Dahrendorf). Liberal pluralism is an inclusive pluralism whose ideal is but a community
of communities: the old medieval idea of a universal community, but, rather, the Kantian
idea of a world confederation of states or the pragmatist idea of a universal community of
communication. Its reality, though, is indeed less shiny: it is real communities where
distribution is made imperfectly, but where at least it happens. The imperfection somehow
denotes its perfectible character. It can degenerate into an oligarquical distribution
but, on its turn, it is always open to democratization.

Economically, liberalism defends the freedom of contract in the market.
But the meaning of economic freedom is wider and should be interpreted as freedom/right
in a fair sense, that is, as the equal right to economic freedom in the normative sense
already mentioned. Liberalism acknowledges that competition in the market, though under
fair rules, produces inequalities. Furthermore, the own access to the market is made from
unequal positions. Hence, its idea of the market is not one of a realm absolutely
autonomous and self-regulated. Instead, liberalism supports a kind of regulatory policy
that ensures the constitutional essentials (Rawls 1993) of the equality of
opportunities. Besides, liberalism upholds that the state must guarantee the public
services that respond to the constitutional idea of basic goods and rights, either through
its own management or through a combined management with the private initiative.

Liberalisms idea of the economy is a welfarist idea, that takes
efficiency and equity as interwoven criteria. That entails, next to the acceptance of the
market as a legitimate domain, that market allocations must be corrected in order to
bring some people closer to the share of resources they would have had but for these
various differences of initial advantage, luck, and inherent capacity (Dworkin 1985,
p. 207).

My purpose in this paper is not to subscribe to a specific kind of
liberalism, but to argue that an egalitarian and universalist model of socio-economic
welfare is a constitutive feature of liberalism. As opposed to the socialist tradition
(more than to the social democratic), liberalism envisages welfare programs as a
preventive alternative to provide for civic opportunities. Then it puts the programs into
practice as a way to empower individuals in matters of resources and rights. For this
reason, it assumes the equality of rights in terms of individual
responsibilities. They are triumphs (Dworkin) to be exercised. Besides, they are goods
deserving care and demanding from their holders a responsibility for their enjoyment
before society.

A liberal policy is an active policy in matters of rights. From a
liberal view, the extension of rights leads to transforming or reforming the status quo.
It is this endeavor where lies the origin of the welfare state and where next to the
liberal imprinting (initially in Britain), appears the social democratic one (in Germany).
Both traditions are so blended in the history of the welfare state, that even after its
crisis of the 1970s and the 1990s, its basic schemes, though with differences, are held
under conservative governments. Even more, the issue of reforming, not dismantling, the
welfare state has been raised by the debate on the future of liberalism.

Before this challenge, liberalism has faced both the laissez-faire
criticism deeming any reform to be one more example of the futility or of the
welfare states incapacity to efficiently provide social services (Hirschman 1991,
pp. 60-69), and the leftist critique of reformism that beforehand considered a
failure any attempt to keep and deepen welfare policies in the capitalist system (Turner
1986, pp. 27-53). Nevertheless, the debate on reformism, which is but the debate on
liberalism, runs not only on social terms. The issue of the social model is indeed a
political matter that directly affects the institutional model of liberal democracy. More
specifically, the model of relations between the state and civil society.

Liberal reformism is civic reformism. The political history of
liberalism draws the transformations of the modern state as related to the conquest of
rights by civil society (Keane 1988). This is, after all, a process of state
democratization that clearly depicts the challenge of liberal reformism: since to
democratize the state means to expand and to deepen the experience of democratic
citizenship.

Liberalism is a public philosophy committed to the accomplishment, the
improvement and, hence, the reform of the civil condition. Thus, committed to a civic
model of democracy. Liberal reformism draws on the experience of democratic citizenship.
Indeed, liberalism depends on the assumption that it aims to create civic opportunities,
namely, opportunities for liberty. Also as a public philosophy, liberalism is committed to
a model of civil society. Accordingly, citizenship is conceived of as the experience of
participation in civil societys pluralism. Thus, citizenship defines the educative
experience of public life (Dewey 1987, pp. 41-65). This idea of the creation of civic
opportunities, of the realization of freedom, summarizes the contribution (as a challenge)
of liberalism, of a reformist liberalism, to democracy.

Acknowledgements

"Liberalism, Civic Reformism and Democracy" draws on a former paper,
"The Benefits of Liberalism", presented at the IPSA XVIIth World Congress in
Seoul, August 1997. I am grateful to Benjamin Barber and José Rubio-Carracedo for their
comments on its previous drafts.

References

Dahrendorf, R. 1988: The Modern Social Conflict. London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Keane, J. 1988: "Despotism and Democracy: the Origins and
Development of the Distinction between Civil Society and the State, 1750-1850", in J.
Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State. London: Verso, pp. 35-71.

Marshall, T. H. 1977: "Citizenship and Social Class" [orig.
ed., 1949], in Class, Citizenship, and Social Development. Chicago/London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1977, pp. 71-134.